Admission Quotes

“There is a sound to waiting. It sounds like held breath pounding its fists against the walls of the lung, damp and muffled beats.”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, Admission

“They were soft-centered, emotional beings wrapped in a terrified carapace, that even though they might appear rational and collected on paper, so focused that you wanted to marvel at their promise and maturity, they were lurching, turbulent muddles of conflict in their three-dimensional lives...the creative ones were desperately afraid they were talentless, and the intellectuals deeply suspected they weren't brilliant, and that every single one of them felt ugly and stupid and utterly fake.”
― Jean Korelitz, Admission

“All ghost stories come to this, she understood. All ghost stories end in one of two ways: You are dead or I am dead. If people only understood this, Portia thought, they would never be frightened, they would only need to ask themselves, Who among us has died?

And then she occurred to her that she was the ghost in her story. She had spent years haunting her own life, without ever noticing.”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, Admission

“She lacked the sheen of money, muscular good health, good skin, good clothes.”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, Admission

“Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, Admission

“What happened to perfectly capable kids who’d been so bombarded with help that they felt helpless to do anything on their own? Or the kids who’d been so driven at home, they’d never had to find their own drive? It couldn’t be good, she thought.”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, Admission

“All ghost stories come to this, she understood. All ghost stories end in one of these two ways: You are dead or I am dead. If people only understood this, Portia thought, they would never be frightened, they would only need to ask themselves, Who among us has died? And then it occurred to her that she was the ghost in her story. She had spent years haunting her own life, without ever noticing.”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, Admission

“The system, as far as she was concerned, was not about the applicant at all. It was about the institution. It was about delivering to the trustees, and to a lesser extent the faculty, a United Nations of scholars, an Olympiad of athletes, a conservatory of artists and musicians, a Great Society of strivers, and a treasury of riches so idiosyncratic and ill defined that the Office of Admission would not know how to go about looking for them and could not hope to find them if they suddenly stopped turning up of their own accord. So get over yourself, Portia thought through her tight, achingly tight, smile, because Diana had now moved on to last year’s scholarship girl, the daughter of the school janitor, who had gone off to Harvard and was a lovely, lovely girl, of course, and certainly a wonderful little flute player, but had scored over one hundred points lower on the math SAT than the class salutatorian, who had been rejected not only by Harvard, but by Yale, Princeton, Brown, Dartmouth, Williams, Amherst, and—can you believe this?—NYU. And come on, everyone knew what that meant. And how—how?—could it be fair?”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, Admission

“But Portia’s application would have landed in the great moving tide of similar applications: great kids, smart kids, hardworking kids who would certainly do great at whatever college they ended up going to, which almost certainly wasn’t going to be Princeton.”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, Admission

“With her strong GPA and merely quite good scores, busy athletic schedule, and character-building volunteer efforts, Portia Nathan’s application would have left this room with a fatal designation of Academic 3/Non-Academic 4, meaning that in the real world her scholastic skills were solid, but in Princeton’s supercharged applicant pool they were unremarkable, and that although she had been busy within her school community, she had not been a leader within that community (NonAc 3) or distinguished herself at the state level (NonAc 2), let alone accomplished something on a national or international scale (NonAc 1). NonAc 1’s, of course, were rather thin on the ground, even in Princeton’s applicant pool. They were Olympic athletes, authors of legitimately published books, Siemens prizewinners, working film or Broadway actors, International Tchaikovsky Competition violinists, and, yes, national judo champions, and they tended to be easy admits, provided they were strong students, which they usually were.”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, Admission

“The house, despite its eerie absence of absent things, was not a comfortable place, and there was nothing compelling her to be here.”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, Admission

“But the goodness in the letter affected her now, and it occurred to her, not for the first time, that Mark had always saved the best of himself for the people he dealt with in his professional life, though perhaps—and this did strike her for the first time—she had done that as well.”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, Admission

“All these years, her sole objective had been to keep still and hope no one would ever know. She had been a mistress of stillness. She had mastered the simulation of peace without a wisp of real peace, like a nun from a silent order who was screaming inside her head, or a yogi racked with pain. How she had managed to fool anyone, let alone everyone, mystified her (how obtuse people were!) and, oddly, made her extraordinarily bitter. Because the price of her gift for evasion was to have no one, not one person, who understood how horrible she felt. All the time. Absolutely all the time.”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, Admission